Early Permanence Quality Mark

Quality Mark

What is the Early Permanence Quality Mark?

The Early Permanence Quality Mark is the standard of excellence awarded to adoption agencies that demonstrate the quality of their service and commitment to delivering early permanence for children where adoption is in their best interest.

The Early Permanence Quality Mark gives adoption agencies the opportunity to innovate and improve agency and regional delivery. The qualitative moderation process by an independent panel of experts assesses applications against a set of sector informed descriptors and guiding principles. The aim of the process is to provide quality feedback to agencies and to encourage positive change in order to drive forward sector best practice in the area of early permanence.

Benefits of the Early Permanence Quality Mark for adoption agencies

Being awarded the Early Permanence Quality Mark is validation that you are working according to sector best practice and will position your agency at the forefront of early permanence, which delivers a number of benefits:

The Quality Mark acknowledges practice achievements, which provides assurance for prospective carers and adopters that the service provision of your agency is of the highest quality.

It demonstrates that quality of service is at the heart of your work, which will positively contribute to any future Ofsted inspection.

It reflects the hard work and dedication of your staff and agency leadership, so creates the right conditions for growing a committed and supported workforce.

The qualitative nature of the moderation process identifies areas of improvement, which can help agencies develop longer-term strategies and sustainability.

Levels of accreditation: Full or Working Towards

There are two levels of accreditation to the Early Permanence Quality Mark: Full and Working Towards.

Agencies are ready to apply for the full Early Permanence Quality Mark if they:

Have a well-rounded approach to enabling early permanence and are seeing progress in their planning, delivery and in the actual outcomes for children

Are committed to early permanence through the delivery of specialist or innovative services

Clearly uphold early permanence principles and partnership working

Certain agencies may wish to apply for a Working Towards recognition, before they apply for the full Early Permanence Quality Mark. These could be agencies who:

Are on their journey to being an RAA, but have not yet consolidated key areas of practice in relation to early permanence across the agencies involved

Have newly restructured and are still in early stages of streamlining their approach and aligning their services, agencies and teams to early permanence delivery (Fostering for Adoption and Concurrent Planning)

Are seeking to develop their strategy and approach to early permanence delivery and would benefit from focal work on developing a comprehensive service action plan

Are wishing to test the sufficiency of their approach, but are not yet in a position to apply for the Quality Mark – they may expect to apply for this at a later stage

A service action plan and supporting documentation, with reference to key elements of the Quality Mark Descriptors, will be required as evidence for recognition of Working Towards Early Permanence status.

Applications for Working Towards recognition will be viewed by an Independent Moderator.

Agencies who gain the Working Towards recognition are supplied with the ‘Working Towards’ logo, to signify sufficiency in working towards early permanence.

The agency and partners to any application must consider whether they would first benefit from applying for the Working Towards status, or whether they immediately proceed to a full award application.